At 250, America is still deciding who belongs
Al Jazeera – News
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Last week, days before the nation’s 250-year anniversary, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to citizenship to nearly everyone born in the US. The president cannot cancel the Constitution by executive order. Immigration advocates across the country celebrated. The ruling was a rebuke to the president’s supercharged anti-immigration agenda. Reading through the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision is instructive, if only because the justices rehearse the ways that different marginalised groups have had their citizenship contested over the years. He sued and won, and his 1898 Supreme Court case solidified the legal foundation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which establishes birthright citizenship. And it should always be remembered that the Indian Citizenship Act, which extended citizenship to the Indigenous peoples of this country, was passed into law only in 1924. Each of these groups, of course, has also had to battle constant voter suppression efforts simply to exercise their full citizenship. The Court also ruled that the government may turn away asylum seekers at ports of entry along the southern border, a policy formalised during the first Trump administration. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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Birthright citizenship survived, but the fight over who is fully recognised as American is far from over.
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